“Get Out of Your Mind, Brother!”: Notes Toward an Anthropology of Anti-“Mind”

This article describes the pursuit of "flow" states within a global Christian following of two famous Chinese Christian preachers, Watchman Ni (1903-1972) and Witness Li (1905-1997). Within this group, whose ideas and practices are deeply rooted in wider Chinese patterns of thought and interaction, "the mind" is rejected. In an attempt to expand its meta-model of mind, I argue that while the "anthropology of mind" thus far has shown how mental health problems can arise from religious projects of "making god real", it has yet to investigate the impacts on wellbeing of rejecting "the mind" altogether. I describe these impacts upon members of the global following of Ni and Li. Tracing their embrace of "flow" over "the mind" to both deep precedents within Chinese history and society and to universal human capacities for "flow", I suggest that an "anthropology of anti-mind" would deepen and widen our understandings of how attitudes to the mind affect wellbeing.